Scorsese Remakes Hitchcock

Posted by Amanda Stoneall

11 years ago

Reading that Martin Scorsese was among those honored in this year’s Kennedy Center honors, presented last night at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington DC last night, my first thought was, geez, hasn’t Scorsese already gotten that award? (My second was, geez, Los Angeles really does have a thing against New Yorkers. Look at how the story was reported in the LA Times: only an editor with a serious coastal bias would rank Steve Martin over Scorsese.)

The Awards gala will be broadcast on December 26.

In the meantime, you can have a look at Scorsese’s new film right here. He was commissioned by the wine company Freixenet to do a short film promoting one of its products. The result is a ten minute short in which Scorsese pays tribute to Alfred Hitchcock by filming a three-page story treatment “discovered” in Hitchcock’s archives. It’s fictional, of course, and it’s fun watching Scorsese poke fun at his image as a dedicated film preservationist as he carefully shows off the three pages as if they were a scared scroll removed from a pharaoh’s tomb. Hitchcock fans will be delighted by the sequence, essentially a remake of the concert sequence from the Man Who Knew Too Much (with music from North by Northwest). And there’s a joke at the end that caps the whole thing nicely. The only thing Scorsese didn’t manage to do was make the product look drinkable.